Bitter Harvest Review

Ann Rule is the queen of true crime, and this lesser-known book of hers is a true gem. Bitter Harvest covers the case of Dr. Debora Green of Prairie Village, Kansas, who seemed to have the perfect life: beautiful home, stable marriage, three healthy children, and her own medical practice. Why did things fall apart? It can be hard to understand the depths to which some people fall, hard to empathize at all with their point of view, but one of the things Rule does so well is instill the antagonists of her books with real humanity. Dr. Green is as malevolent and ill-spirited a soul as you will see in true crime, yet Rule never forgets to make the reader see how she came to her eventual end, and it’s somehow easy to wish that things could have turned out differently for her.